I went to Ketcham Traps on Saturday morning around 10 AM. I was given a ride by Will's mother (Will is my boyfriend. I was at his house for the weekend and it was very pleasant to be off campus and relax!) and we found the place pretty easily, but being New Bedford it was on a one way street, and we had to go around a couple times to find the entrance. Ketcham Traps is really cool. There are two large old brick warehouses (the ones you find everywhere in New Bedford) on either side of a courtyard and various cages in stacks in between. It was a little bit sketchy going, because the front door looks more like a side door and has a lot of stickers on it, but it was the right one. Inside there's a main office with all sorts of rope and cages. Myron (one of the owners, I believe the other owner’s name is Bob) gave us a tour and showed us all of the aquaculture gear.
There are a lot of different options for aquaculture. Primarily there are bags, which are meant for seed and smaller oysters, and cages, which are mean for the larger oysters. Cages can be made to order with the specific sized wire mesh and the number of slots you would like. They make the cages on site in the second of the two warehouses I described. Since it was a Saturday, they were not making any, however Myron said there was a Youtube Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj0jiVs-QFY).
While he was giving the tour, I asked Myron about the prices of the various cages, which sparked an interesting conversation. A large cage that would be used to hang off the bottom of a barge and had 20 slots (1 slot would contain about 200 oysters) was $250. The OysterGro System, which has floats and 6 slots was $130. (OysterGro Systems advises one to put no more than 100 OysterGro cages per 1 acre.) Myron also told me that you could expect each slot of oysters to cost about $10.
Doing mental math in my head has never been my strong suit, but even I could tell that start-up costs were much more than I had expected. Actually, now that I have mentioned math I feel compelled to do some. Assuming my grant is 1 acre and I have decided to buy OysterGro cages I can expect the cages to cost $13,000 plus the $10 per slot would bring me to $19,000. Not to mention the cost of the seed, rope, permit, and other tools. AND I wont turn a profit for at least a year, if not two (Myron knows a farmer in Wareham who’s turnaround time is 14 months!). Wow, right.
All in all, I found my visit to be very informative and quite fun, even if I find the prices to be absolutely mind boggling (I’m a pretty stingy person. Starbucks coffee is a lot of money, so oyster cages are in a whole new dimension of expensive.). I really liked Myron, he seems like a very knowledgeable person and he was eager to help, which was very gratifying after my unhelpful trip to the bank last week.
Now we can talk about today. It was not as productive as I had hoped. I read Managerial Accounting for Dummies and actually understood it the first time I read it, which was really great. I also read another of my Senior Project books The Big Oyster, which is about the history of oyster cultivation in New York. It is interesting, but so far I have not learned much about either, since it is still talking about settling in America. Finally there was my water quality. It was fine and going well, until I realized that the setup for cell counts had all been put away. So I spent my free running around the MANs looking in all the cupboards searching for glutaraldehyde to kill my culture before it photosynthesized more. So I did not go to the bank. Which was a real bummer. However I did do some reading on the SBA website, and I believe that seeing the bank about loans is something that should come later in the process. In any case it was disappointing, but I am positive that tomorrow will be better.
Also one last thing, since this post is getting really long. I talked to Ms. Ulmer about her boyfriend (yes that sounds weird, I know). He works at an oyster farm on the cape and would apparently be an excellent source of information, especially since his boss, the owner of the farm is considering buying a second. AND here is the silver lining of my day, if I hadn’t been on the search for glutaraldehyde I would not have talked to Ms. Ummer today.
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